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The following oral history is the result of an
interview with Blanca R. She was born in Burgos in 1959 and, when she was
three, the family moved to a little industrial city in the Basque Country. She
remembers the seventies as a time of changes. She lived in a changing society
which would promote real equality between men and women.
In the early seventies
women were simply wives and mothers. Only they had
to carry out housework and care and education of children. Parents treated sons
and daughters differently. She explains her own experience. Her father was a doctor and her mother
did the housework and brought up children. She helped her mother in these
activities. Neither her father nor her brothers involved in these tasks. She
remembers that they were always assigned to the girls, not to the boys. And she
didn’t challenge traditional gender roles, she didn’t complain about it.
She explains that in the seventies, after getting
married, a woman often assumed her new husband’s surname. The new couple often
bought cards, reflecting their name; first of all, the husband’s name and
surname and then wife’s name and surname and the expression “señora de” and her
husband’s surname.
In her opinion, women simply accepted the situation
because they were used to it.
There were more inequalities and sexist attitudes. She
explains that, in the early 70s, in her city there were single-sex public
primary and secondary schools and only a mixed public secondary school, where
she studied. However, boys were separated from girls in different
classrooms. Later, boys and girls began to stay at the same classroom. At the beginning, girls were sitting on the right of the classroom and boys,
on the left. It was the same in the schoolyard. Boys played in one side and
girls, in the other side. She remembers that, a few years later girls and boys
sat together and stayed together in the schoolyard. During early 70s there were
also some differences in the treatment of boys and girls in the classroom
through different programs of study. She remembers that, while girls received
sewing and musical instruction, boys learnt how to do manual wooden works. What
is more, in Political and physical education, they had not only different
lessons, but also different teachers. Boys had a
man, girls had a woman. She also says that there was a law which
obligated women to complete a period of Social Service training for motherhood.
Boys had to do military service.
Inequalities also appear in matter of clothes. She
remembers, for example, that girls had to cover their head with a veil in church.
She also says that for several years they couldn’t wear bikini. Girls had to
wear shorts under the skirt to do gymnastic and they weren’t allowed to wear trousers to go to school.
She explains that one day a
friend of her was thrown out of the school due to the fact that she was wearing
trousers.
She also says that she went
to church every Monday and she and her friends helped teaching of the
catechism. They sang sons and played the guitar with children in mass. There
was no boy with them, just only the priest.
In the seventies there was a strict moral. She
remembers that a priest scolded her parents’ friend because they were embracing
each other in the street. Besides that, girls’ attitude was
generally passive. Boys asked girls to dance. They decided when to begin a
romance. Parents didn’t accept that their daughter could live with a man
without being married. What is more, she says that if a man and a woman wanted
to go to a hotel, they were asked to show their family book in order to justify
that they were married.
But over the year gender differences were in a process
of change. Traditional Spanish social values and attitudes were modified and so
were the role and the situation of women. Steps were taken to improve women’s status
and gender differences began to disappear. But changing unequal gender roles and relations takes
time.
She says that the end of
the decade was a time of great transition and a period of change for women in
Spain. Gender differences were reduced in this decade. Like her, many other
girls expected to have a job and to be independent. In the last seventies women
increased their presence at University. However, in some studies, like Engineer
or Economist, women only represented a minority. She explains that in her
brother’s class, who studied Engineer, there was no girl, and in her brother’s
class, who studied Economist, the rate was smaller for girls, only five
percent. She thinks these studies had been traditionally considered masculine
studies. Her parents
and her brothers encouraged her to study at University. And she wanted it too.
She began her studies at University in 1976. She didn’t remember any kind of
differences there. What is more, as women had been accepted their expected
roles in family and society, it is in the University where she had the
opportunity to know that there was a discriminatory legislation and women were
on a subordinate position to men.
So she explains that, until
1975, women needed their husbands’ authorization in order to access to a formal
job, to sign contracts, to purchase goods, to open a bank account and to carry
economic activities. Norms were not
flexible about cohabitation or having children outside the marital relationship
and the sale of contraceptives was banned. But these restrictions disappeared
and some legal
measures were approved reducing discrimination against women.
She thinks that these improvements could be associated
with the new political system, with the democracy, even to the benefits of the tourism.
So, she explains that in
1978 Constitution was passed. And this norm stipulates that the Spaniards are
equal for the law, being forbidden any kind of discrimination due to sex. In
spite of that, she still remembers some vestiges of a sexist society.
SILVIA SIERRA
